Coalition for Clean Air Takes a Look at Your Commute

Did you know that the city of Burbank will pay you to bike to work? Have you heard about community college students flocking to low-cost transit with their new institutional TAP program? What about California’s parking cash-out law?

The Coalition for Clean Air’s recently released report, "Getting to work: Your clean air commute," is a guide for employers, workers and policymakers in order to provide smarter transportation benefits to our workforce. CCA surveyed large employers in Los Angeles County, reviewed literature and consulted with transportation demand management (TDM) experts to compile their findings.

The report highlights best practices for employers to promote bicycling, carpooling, parking management, telework, transit, vanpooling and walking. It concludes with a series of policy recommendations, including:

· Expanding employer-based transit passes

· Expanding use of parking cash-out

· Improving work site transfer policies to allow employees to more easily switch to workplaces closer to home

Learn more about clean air commuter options, and share your thoughts and stories here.

Parking cash out is really important. Employers actually subsidize the parking of their employees. Why not give employees the option of taking cash if they don’t use the parking, or, better yet, why not just pay the cost of parking to all employees as extra salary and let them use it on what they choose?

Making it easier for employees to telecommute where feasible is really important too. If your job involves you sitting in front of a computer all day and there’s a way to monitor what you do, you really don’t have to show up at the office every day. The cleanest, fastest, and cheapest way to work is staying home!

Spokker

I wish I could use the parking cash out option. Unfortunately I sometimes have to go to work after hours and on weekends when transit doesn’t run. I could do it, but I would lose money by not working those extra hours.

Parking cash out produces results, seriously. I got parking cash out started at my work (Sony’s SM Game Studio) in a busy part of business district in Santa Monica. The incentive is pretty enticing and get’s peoples gears turning, literally. Bike ridership has grown from me and like 3 or 4 people who did it regularly to 2 over flowing bicycle racks and people sticking bikes between cubicles and under stair wells. I think as more picked it up it had a snowball effect, and I even overheard someone talking about giving it a try and saying all the cool kids are doing it. One of the guys who started bike commuting it seems only a few months ago is now a full fledged roadie who loves hill climbing and has started following the Tour De France coverage. If we can push for parking cash out to the be standard rather than the exception, I really feel a lot of our other goals will start to fall in place as the demand for alternatives to the automobile will shoot up.

@spokker – There are ways to work this out for a worksite like yours. You might want to check out the report section on “per day’ benefits. Parking cash-out can be administered best on a per day basis. You wouldn’t have to cash out a full month; you could get casn-out those days that you don’t park.

@Gary – Good to hear you parking cash-out story. In my review of research, parking cash is out one of the best benefits – it works across the spectrum, promoting walking, biking, transit, carpool, vanpool, etc. Free parking is an inadvertent incentive for driving… as we put other modes on the same footing, they become much more viable.

Joe Linton (report author)

ALSO ON STREETSBLOG

With a "parking cash out" policy, employers who provide employees with parking benefits also give the equivalent value in cash to workers who don't car commute. Now a version of that idea has been introduced in the DC Council by members Charles Allen, Mary Cheh, and Brianne Nadeau.

Nonprofit reporting group California Watch recently looked at how Californians travel to work and concluded that free parking provided by the state’s employers is leading to a lot of street-clogging solo car commuting. Californians are only slightly more likely than the average American to carpool (11.4 percent) or ride public transit (5.2 percent) to work, and […]

If you drive to work, you can get a $230 monthly parking benefit, subsidized by the federal government and paid through your employer. If you take transit, right now you can get up to $230 per month, but the cap may revert to $120 when the current transit benefit law expires this fall. And if […]

How much does a parking space cost? That question has been on a lot of people’s minds recently. The City Council is trying to figure out how much its metered street and garage parking is worth and now State Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield wants to discover the cash value of employee parking. A.B. 1186 would require […]

The federal government spends billions of dollars a year on tax subsidies that make traffic congestion worse, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by TransitCenter and the Frontier Group. The culprit is the parking commuter tax benefit, which costs taxpayers $7.3 billion in foregone revenue each year, all while adding more than 800,000 cars to rush-hour […]